This is a guest post by Brian Thomas from Enlightened Digital, and covers a few additional team building activities for remote teams to the ones I’ve covered previously here.
Remote work is becoming the new normal amongst companies with the capabilities to do so. Whether you have been with your company for a year or two months before quarantining, it can still get lonely in your home office without the constant bustle of office life happening around you. For new hires, it can be even more difficult.
While virtual employment definitely has some perks, it is more common to experience a disconnect amongst coworkers. Team disconnect can become a common and major issue if there is no communication or shared goal that a team feels like they’re meeting together. Preventing this issue by making sure there is a team bond can increase production, engagement, and overall happiness of your team.
Here are three tips on activities you can do with your remote team.
1. Personality Quizzes
While there are many reasons why a person can have a hard time connecting with others, one reason is feeling misunderstood. Taking a personality quiz as a team and then coming together to share insights might help your team not only understand what they need from a leader or their team, but also understand what they can bring to the team themselves.
Finding one that includes a section that describes their personality in the workplace among its many other sections will be the most beneficial in this team bonding exercise. Try having your team take the quiz individually and then come to a meeting with these specific answers:
- Three things that surprised them or resonated with them
- Two things they need from a leader/workplace
- One thing they can bring to the team
This exercise can help the employee gain a deeper understanding of themselves and what they bring to the workplace. As a team, this can help each member connect and find similarities and differences in work ethic and personality traits.
2. Virtual Happy Hour
At the end of a stressful week, your team might really enjoy some cool-down time where they can kick back with a drink and chat amongst themselves. Maybe allow your team to have an hour to themselves before work is out on Friday where you facilitate a “happy hour” over Zoom.
Not only can you spend the time drinking beverages of your choice, but you can chat about your week or play mini games with your team. A couple ideas are to have your team members send in a fun fact and have the team guess whose is whose, or sending in baby photos and having the team guess. These can be fun ice-breakers that allow for some funny jokes and team building!
With this idea, you can also turn it into a soft skill learning experience. To help with storytelling, which is an important skill to have in any industry, you can have one person start a story with a sentence, followed by the next person and so on until an entire story is built. Not only will this help with quick thinking and story building, but it can get the shy members out of their comfort zone and presenting confidently to the team.
3. Pictionary
For a more fun and creative team building activity, you can play a game of Pictionary. This can be just with your internal team or even against another team at your company. There are many platforms in which you can participate in these games. Hop onto a Zoom call with your team and load up a free platform and you have a lot of laughs and even more mediocre drawings.
This can be an activity you do on your virtual happy hour or on its own to kick-start the weekend with your team. If your company has a charity they often donate to, you can charge members of your team to play and donate the funds to the company as a charity event. This can be a quick and easy way to bond with your team and have some water-cooler conversations about.
There are so many things you can do with your team to help grow their bond. A great bond with and amongst your team can promote knowledge sharing, creativity, and productivity, but it can also help the company excel towards their culture goals. Teams that enjoy working together and actually work well together can be productive powerhouses in the workplace that come up with new and fresh ideas as they explore each individual’s abilities and knowledge.
While these are just a few ideas of activities that remote teams can take advantage of, the best ideas can come from your team itself. Ask your team members what they would enjoy doing, test out a few ideas, and maybe take some time to combine a few and have a weekly or monthly meeting where you just focus on each other.
